BI Gorillas: The age of pure-play business intelligence is coming to an end.

The age of pure-play business intelligence software vendors seems to be coming to an end. After quietly sitting in the trees watching the little monkeys accumulate lots of bananas, the big gorillas finally jumped in and took control of the BI jungle. The four largest BI software vendors in the world are now Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

For some of these megavendors, their BI technologies have changed hands so many times it is hard to trace back the original developers. Oracle acquired Hyperion, which had bought Brio Software, which had gotten some of its reporting tools from SQRiBE Technologies. SAP bought Business Objects while it was still in the process of merging its BI technology with that acquired from Crystal Decisions, which had been acquired by Seagate Technology.

Oracle and SAP are building technology stacks to compete for the enterprise application space. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft all want the database market, a key factor in business intelligence. IBM and Microsoft fight each other over the operating systems and databases.

Of course, the consolidation is not over yet. Standalone vendors such as SAS, Microstrategy, and Information Builders have not yet been assimilated into a megavendor stack. IBM already rebrands Information Builders' WebFOCUS product as their mid-range web replacement for a legacy reporting tool. Hyperion had been looking to buy Information Builders right until they became Oracle. BI customers with large data warehouses often use Microstrategy with the Teradata database computer, so there is potential for a new stack to emerge there. Do not forget other large vendors such as HP and Sun, which may also decide to get into the BI game.

An interesting exercise is to look at the web job boards to see which technologies are in demand based on job posting. Using the SimplyHired job consolidator, Microsoft Reporting Services shows up at the top of the list with over 20K job postings in the United States (of course, this does not really equate to 20K real job openings as there are many redundant postings being counted). Next is SAS, with over 15K postings. Cognos is in third place with over 10K openings (interestingly, IBM posted over 20% of these positions). Separate searches for Business Objects and Crystal Reports come up about even, with each over 8K. There are over 3300 Hyperion Reports postings, over 2200 for Oracle Discover, and about 1500 for Brio.

The pure-play vendors have a much smaller demand. Microstrategy has less than 2K postings. Actuate postings are a little over 1200, and WebFOCUS jobs are at about 350. If you are wondering about the demand for open-source reporting tools such as Pentaho, JReports, and BIRT, here are the statistics: less than 200 postings for the whole group.

The real message here is that there are just too many BI tools. If your organization has multiple reporting tools, you should consider establishing a corporate BI standard and consolidating the others. If you are using a reporting tool that is not web-based, you can safely assume that its days are numbered. If your reporting app dev consists of programmers typing in a text editor, you need to move to modern toolsets that will have better potential for future support.

Even within a single vendor, there are too many tools. For example, it will not make good business sense for a company like Oracle to continue to support, enhance, and market 20 different BI products. Despite assurances to existing clients, it seems unlikely that Oracle would really bear the burden of keeping acquired reporting technology that was written two decades ago and has minimal use in today's market.

At Partner Intelligence, we can help companies like yours replace legacy reporting tools. Our experienced BI consultants have unique software that helps automate much of the manual work of enterprise BI consolidations, dramatically reducing the time, cost, risk, and skill needs. For more information, please contact Doug Lautzenheiser, General Manager of Partner Intelligence.